Modern Luck: Narratives of Fortune in the Long Twentieth Century (Comparative Literature and Culture) - Softcover

Gordon, Robert S. C.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1800083602 ISBN 13: 9781800083608

Publisher: UCL Press, 2023

Synopsis

Beliefs, superstitions and tales about luck are present across all human cultures, according to anthropologists. We are perennially fascinated by luck and by its association with happiness and danger, uncertainty and aspiration. Yet it remains an elusive, ungraspable idea, one that slips and slides over time: all cultures reimagine what luck is and how to tame it at different stages in their history, and the modernity of the ‘long twentieth century’ is no exception to the rule. Apparently overshadowed by more conceptually tight, scientific and characteristically modern notions such as chance, contingency, probability or randomness, luck nevertheless persists in all its messiness and vitality, used in our everyday language and the subject of studies by everyone from philosophers to psychologists, economists to self-help gurus. Modern Luck sets out to explore the enigma of luck’s presence in modernity, examining the hybrid forms it has taken on in the modern imagination, and in particular in the field of modern stories. Indeed, it argues that modern luck is constituted through narrative, through modern luck stories. Analysing a rich and unusually eclectic range of narrative taken from literature, film, music, television and theatre – from Dostoevsky to Philip K. Dick, from Pinocchio to Cimino, from Curtiz to Kieślowski – it lays out first the usages and meanings of the language of luck, and then the key figures, patterns and motifs that govern the stories told about it, from the late nineteenth century to the present day.

About this title

About the Author

Robert S. C. Gordon teaches in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics at the University of Cambridge, where he has been Serena Professor of Italian since 2012. He has published widely on modern literature, film and cultural history, including major studies of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Primo Levi and Holocaust memory. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Edition details

• Publisher: UCL Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1800083602
• ISBN 13: 9781800083608
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 300